Native Americans

This edition of SToH presents an interesting discussion about the "food insecurity" affecting so many Native American individuals, families, and communities today, here in Oklahoma and all over the nation. Addressing this insecurity --- and the serious and widespread health issues stemming from it --- is no easy task, and we meet a locally based public-health researcher, filmmaker, activist, and advocate who's taking a deliberately multifaceted approach in doing so. Dr.

On this edition of ST, we welcome Dr. Suzan Shown Harjo, a noted poet, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate. She'll soon be in our community to participate in the Greater Tulsa Indian Art Festival, which runs from Friday the 31st through Sunday the 2nd at the Glenpool Conference Center; Dr. Harjo will serve as the poet-in-residence at this festival.

On this edition of ST, we are discussing a soon-to-open exhibit at the Gilcrease Museum here in Tulsa, "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Warriors: Photographs by Gertrude Käsebier," which will go on view Sunday, November 24th. Our guest is Michelle Delaney, director of the Consortium for Understanding the American Experience at the Smithsonian Institution.

The Osage ballet, "Wahzhazhe," had its premiere last summer here in Oklahoma; it was first conceived of about four years ago, and was originally inspired by a suite of music by Lou Brock, an Osage composer. This contemporary ballet brings together certain special qualities of Osage history and culture: a reverence for classical ballet (which was, of course, the legacy of two famous Osage ballerinas, Maria and Marjorie Tallchief) and a deep respect also for the richness of Osage traditional music, dance, and textile arts.

Over the past four decades, the efforts of the Cherokee Freedman to gain full tribal rights within the Cherokee Nation have, by turns, burned or simmered, so to speak; today, this issue is now being pushed back and forth in our federal court system. On this installment of ST, a review of such matters as we welcome back to our program Hannibal B. Johnson, a Tulsa-based author, attorney, and human-rights activist. Johnson tells us about his new book, "Apartheid in Indian Country?

On this installment of ST, we're pleased to welcome Joy Harjo, the prolific and widely acclaimed poet, musician, and author. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She's won a great many awards and accolades for her writing over the years, and has recorded five CDs thus far in her thriving musical career.

On this edition of StudioTulsa, our guest is the Washington-based attorney Reid Chambers, who was formerly (during the Nixon and Ford administrations) Associate Solicitor for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Chambers will be the moderator for a free-to-the-public forum entitled "Renunciation of Termination, Self-Determination, and the Trust Relationship," which is being jointly presented by the Gilcrease Museum, the University of Tulsa, the National Archives, and the Richard Nixon Foundation.

On our show today, we present a conversation with the Tulsa-based writer and curator Diana C. du Pont, who has recently published a book called "You Can't Eat Dirt: Leading America's First All-Women Tribal Council and How We Changed Palm Springs." It's a profile of one Vyola J. Ortner, who led the first-ever all-women tribal council in the United States, and it's co-written with Ortner herself.

On today's ST, we speak with Christina Burke, Curator of Native American and Non-Western Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art here in Tulsa. Burke assembled an exhibit which opened at the museum earlier this month, and which is on view through June 3rd, called "Seeking the Sacred: Religious Ritual in Native American Art." It's a show that mainly draws on Philbrook's world-famous collection of 20th-century Native American paintings.